All About Standard Process / Dr. Royal Lee - The Legacy

Dr. Royal Lee, founder of Standard Process, was a pioneer in the field of nutrition (some consider him the world's greatest nutritionist). His processing techniques are even today so far beyond what anyone else is doing in the supplement industry as to seem an undreamed of possibility.

Even though his name is known to only a small number of Americans, Dr. Lee was a researcher, inventor, scientist, scholar, statesman, businessman and philanthropist of the first order. Dr. Lee was born on April 7, 1885 and reared on a farm near Edmund in the southwestern part of Wisconsin. At the age of twelve he had compiled a notebook on biochemistry and nutrition by copying definitions from the school dictionary. He also started collecting books on those subjects that he continued collecting over the years, resulting in one of the largest individual such collections in the world. While a student in high school, he taught advanced physics to a class of fifteen students. Upon graduation he engaged in various businesses before being drafted by the army to serve in World War I. At the conclusion of the war and his discharge in 1919, he enrolled in Marquette University, Milwaukee, where he graduated from dental college in 1924.

Lee's genius as an electronic inventor led to more than 100 electronic patents (such as the governor for electric motors and the Phono-Cardiograph). Through the years he acquired close to one hundred patents in the electrical field. He invented advanced weapons control systems during WWII, and he assisted NASA with his motor control design for their Lunar Guidance Systems. When he was 12 he compiled a notebook on biochemistry and nutrition by copying definitions on the subject from school dictionaries, and he started collecting books on those subjects--a hobby he continued throughout his lifetime.

While attending Marquette University problems of nutrition were among his major interests. A paper he prepared in December 1923, outlined the relationship of vitamin deficiency to tooth decay and showed the necessity of vitamins in the diet. His continuing research led to the development of Catalyn ®, a vitamin concentrate derived from natural sources. In 1929 the Vitamins Products Company was founded and the one original product became the nucleus of a complete line of nutritional supplements. Dr. Lee designed specific equipment utilizing high-vacuum, low-temperature drying techniques to preserve the maximum nutrients of the whole foods used in Standard Process^® products.

Dr. Lee's overwhelming passion was nutrition. He incorporated Dr. Albrecht's experiments and discoveries with soil into his own research; and, for almost 50 years, Dr. Lee "amassed an encyclopedic body of knowledge in plant, animal, and human health and its links to soil, food processing, diet, and nutrition.... To coordinate and communicate nutritional breakthroughs from both his own laboratory and laboratories throughout the world, he established The Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, which in its day was the world's largest clearing house for nutritional information for doctors, homemakers, and agriculturalists."

In the early 1920’s, America faced a new health threat: coronary heart disease. Dr. Lee knew that the vitamins and other nutrients were removed from flour and rice by commercial milling, and he believed that this had a bearing on the subject of heart disease. At about this same time, the scientific community was able to isolate vitamins and standardize them as drugs. In effect, the food manufacturers altered and removed the health-sustaining components from the grains they were milling and then “fortified” the product by adding synthetic, inert vitamins. thus, the public was fooled into thinking they were getting the real thing.

In 1937, at the same time Dr. Lee was in court fighting the FDA to be able to advertise Zypan®(the hydrochloric acid tablet he designed to help with digestion), Camel cigarettes was able to advertise in Life magazine that smoking cigarettes would promote digestion!!! This Camel ad can be seen in Empty Harvest and it shows a Thanksgiving meal divided into five courses, with short blurbs on how smoking in between each course will "help your digestion to run smoothly". A food editor, Miss Dorothy Malone, is pictured in one comer of the ad, saying, "It's smart to have Camels on the table. My own personal experience is that smoking Camels with my meals and afterwards builds up a sense of digestive well-being." The cigarette ad went on to say, "Enjoy Camels all you wish - all through the day."

Dr. Lee and other pioneers exposed the chronic malnutrition rampant in our nation, how indigestion was caused by the worn-out digestive tracts of the civilized diet, how dental caries, diabetes, and other diseases were caused by sugar, and they were persecuted with the full power and unlimited taxpayer resources of the FDA.  Dr. Lee was branded a racketeer because he promoted whole, natural, unadulterated foods with their vitamins and minerals intact. When he designed digestive aids with enzymes and calcium products to replace the loss of the minerals through processing and sugarized diets, he was branded a faddist and extremist who was duping the public.

Dr. Lee was trying to give the public a way of getting the vitamins and other nutrients that were removed from flour and rice by commercial milling. He knew that these factors were the reason for the epidemic of coronary heart attacks that was sweeping the country in the early 1920's. And every time he tried to advertise anything that related to what was going on, he ended up in court.

You can see from the following quote made by Dr. Lee on October 2, 1933 that he was fifty years ahead of his time in the field of nutrition:

“Candy, all white sugar or its products, and white flour including its products such as macaroni, spaghetti, crackers, etc., should be absolutely barred from the diet of the child. All these are energy-producing foods that contain no building materials for the body. The consequences of their toleration are susceptibility to infections, enlarged tonsils, carious teeth, unruly dispositions, stunted growth, rickets, maldevelopment and very often permanent damage to many organs of the body (especially the endocrine glands) that depend upon the vitamin supply for their normal function and development.”

As Dr. Lee's and other's voices got muffled out, the marketplace became filled with grains and cereals that had artificial vitamins added back into them, all for huge profits. The newsletter of The Center for Science in the Public Interest, Nutritional Action (Vol. 16, No. 1), reports that the only difference between General Mills' Wheaties and Total cereals is that 1.5 cents worth of synthetic vitamins are sprayed on Total. Total is then sold for 65 cents more than Wheaties. This practice alone has generated $425 million in additional profits since 1972 for General Mills. Who's the real racketeer here?

Sadly, these huge profits mean that millions of people have ingested untold pounds of chemicalized and enriched food. Sadly also, the world that Dr. Wiley, Dr. Lee, and others envisioned was not allowed to be.

If you are to be any healthier at all, you've got to find out all the lies that have been generated over the last 90 years. If you don't, well, you'll just be another statistic and die of a chronic degenerative disease such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease. It's you choice.

For almost half a century, doctors throughout the nation have used Dr. Lee’s products with great success. Today Standard Process as the company is now known, carries a line of almost 150 products to serve health professionals and their patients. BecomeHealthyNow.com supports and uses Standard Process products to aid our patients in achieving better states of health.

As today's population gets sicker and sicker, more and more people are finding out about the value and importance of good nutrition and its role in the treatment of human ailments. You can be assured that when you purchase Standard Process supplements, you are getting the best any company has to offer.

We wish you the best in your quest for better health. Avail yourself of all the information on this site. It could save or prolong your life.